I watched The Wind (“El Viento” si estás funky), starring the lady with the creepy blue eyes from They Live and Wings Hauser from GETEVEN and like, a Beastmaster. A good sick/hangover movie because there is no plot or anything to follow, it’s just Wings Hauser terrorizing Meg Foster during a gale in some Greek port town. It’s goofy as hell but I was expecting something a lot worse from the plot synopsis.
I re-watched Halloween 4 and 5. I think 4 is the best Halloween sequel if you exclude Halloween 3, which I don’t usually rate against the others since I don’t consider it part of the same “SaGa”, and if you look at Halloween 3 from like, any other context, it winds up being way more interesting than anything they wound up doing with the mainline series. Like, it you look at it as a separate but also weird event going on concurrently with Michael Myers, then you wonder what else is going out there? Did their reality shift into some bizarre strangereality where stonehenge and celtic magic can control people’s minds and fill their heads with bugs and kids are suddenly turning into these emotionless, unstoppable killers? Like, a proto-Eerie, Indiana but with much higher stakes.
Anyway, Halloween 4 feels like a re-imagining of the first movie which winds up ultimately being more fun and more interesting than any of the attempts to explain his origin and the stupid cult of Thorn nonsense. Its ending parallels with how Halloween 1 opens which is pretty cool and shouldn’t have been ignored by 5, but 5 had a really shitty director. You can tell what tone both of these movies are trying to set with their opening credits, but that’s only doing any favors for 4.
Halloween 4 opens with these credits:
Halloween 5 opens with these credits:
Halloween 4 has these quiet, spooky shots of the midwest in Autumn (apparently Utah in the Spring?) vs Halloween 5’s goofy ass CQC pumpkin carving complete with whoosh whish whoosh slash cling. michael myers for the pepsi generation.
Comparing them to Halloween 3’s opening credits is unfair, though. A super close-up shot of an image of a pumpkin being drawn line-by-line on a monitor with each line drawn accompanied by a synthesizer stab.
I also saw Scared Stiff, which isn’t very good at all unless you’re interested in a sub-House (American House, not Japanese House) style movie. There is one part that made me go, “What!?”
Thought that kid said “Star Fox” and then suddenly
I don’t think I’ve ever made it to the ending of Demons before. It’s not very good. Demons 2 is better – it’s in an apartment building! There’s this subplot involving these thugs doing cocaine out of a Coke can and then stopping to clean up all of the cocaine they spilled with a razor blade. I can see why it was apparently cut from some releases, it’s so fucking stupid and pointless.
The guy in the mask is the director of Cemetery Man. He directed The Church, which was supposed to be Demons 3, I think, but then he decided he didn’t want to call it that, but then when he saw the sales, he decided the Demons name wasn’t so bad and I think he wound up doing Demons 4 or 6 or something. Cemetery Man was apparently called “Demons 95” in some places, as well, so.
Demons 2 is more incomprehensible nonsense, but the 80s fake american apartment building is a much cooler setting than the movie theatre. The location upgrade feels very video game-y, you even have a chunk of the movie taking place in the underground parking garage.
The Stuff was a lot better than I remembered it being. The Changeling is OK but George C. Scott is scarier than any ghost.
